They’re about to close Barlinnie down and throw away the key ... but what exactly is replacing it?
NATALIE Logan MacLean remembers how she felt when she was about to visit Barlinnie for the first time.
She knew its reputation as the worst prison in Scotland and had heard all the stories about the conditions, the violence and what the place could do to people.
It’s fair to say the emotion she was feeling when she first went to the building was fear. She was terrified.
Then she got inside, met some of the prisoners, and started talking to them. She found that a lot of the guys ended up in trouble because of what they had been through during their childhoods – and Logan MacLean knows herself what that can be like.
She also saw men come in and out of the place for the pettiest of crimes – stealing a steak from Lidl – and started to see the need for the whole dysfunctional, expensive, counter-productive system to change.
Driven by the desire to improve things – and driven too by what she had been through in her own life – Logan MacLean set up a charity called Sisco which works with prisoners in Barlinnie to help them recover from drugs. She now runs a regular Recovery Café and works with the men to get to the reasons for their behaviour. Sometimes, she’ll ask them to remember what they were like as a kid and what they wanted to be when they grew up (interestingly, they’ll often say policeman). The fact they ended up in Barlinnie instead – sometimes over and over again – is the key to working out how we can change things.
And now is a really good time to raise the question. Barlinnie will be closing for good soon and a new facility, HMP Glasgow, will be built to replace it on a 54-acre site in Provanmill.
In many ways, it will be a radical change: the original Barlinnie dates back to the 1880s and, with overcrowded conditions that have often been condemned as unfit for purpose, it is still recognisable as a Victorian prison and still based, some would say, on Victorian principles.
No hard cells
THE new jail will be different, however. On the outside, the plans by the construction company Kier make it look very un-prison-like indeed. There are beautiful grounds and a big glass front that makes it resemble a company’s headquarters rather than a prison. Inside, there will be lots of changes too.
Barlinnie is notoriously overcrowded – it was built for 1,000 men but houses closer to 1,500. The new prison, by contrast, will have single cells and may have phones and computer screens in the rooms too.
In many ways, it will be a radical departure. The question is: will it be radical enough?
There are some who think that the whole idea of building something like HMP Glasgow in the first place is flawed. Keith Gardner has decades of experience working in prisons, including with inmates who have committed sexual offences. He has also run community justice services and thinks there is a problem with building another huge prison.
“It’s like a reverse Field Of Dreams,” he says. “If you build it, they will fill it. If it’s for 800, I guarantee you that in three months it